Uncertainties are everywhere: climate change, financial crises, migration flows, infrastructure development, disease outbreaks and more. Yet contemporary institutions and policy processes are poor at responding to and embracing uncertainties, where we don’t know about either the likely outcomes or their probabilities. Too often political, procedural and professional pressures force us to ignore uncertainties, constructing problems and solutions in terms of manageable risk. In this presentation, it will be argued that this is highly problematic, and that we can learn much from those who live daily with uncertainty and make use of it as a productive resource. Pastoralists – people living largely from livestock in dryland, montane and Mediterranean regions – have long experience of responding to intersecting uncertainties. Perceptions, cultures and practices; markets and economic relations; and institutional arrangements and governance systems have co-evolved with environmental, economic and political uncertainties. Can we learn from these experiences for other contexts, where the challenges of responding to uncertainty are real, and growing? Without arguing that lessons are directly transferrable, the presentation will ask what core principles might be relevant for refashioning policies, practices and institutions, across diverse fields, in order to confront heightened uncertainties in today’s world? The presentation launches a new ERC Advanced Grant, involving research on pastoral systems in Chinese Tibet, East Africa and Sardinia, and engaging with those in other fields grappling with uncertainty. The grant is held at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK and involves collaboration with the Global Governance Programme at EUI.

Citizenship laws and policies form a resilient core of state sovereignty. International legal norms have emerged to avoid conflicts between states and to secure basic human rights in matters of nationality law. Yet states have remained largely free to choose their own rules for determining who are their citizens by birth or naturalisation and under which conditions citizenship can be lost through renunciation or withdrawal. Even within the European Union, whose supranational citizenship is derived from Member State nationality, there has been no effort to harmonize national citizenship laws.

Yet state sovereignty in this matter does not mean that state policies are not influenced by what other states are doing and by migration flows across international borders. The comparative literature on citizenship has so far focused nearly exclusively on domestic drivers of citizenship policy and reform, including historic conditions for nation-building and the domestic politics of citizenship in which left-wing and right-wing parties have contrasting ideological commitments and are incentivized by different electoral interests. While domestic factors clearly matter, they are insufficient for understanding how citizenship policies evolve over time. Historical institutionalist explanations have also led to an unwarranted assumption that citizenship regimes can be compared as internally coherent national models. Such models are based on either ethnic or civic normative conceptions of membership and can be described by a few selected indicators, such as the predominance of ius sanguinis or ius soli provisions. The strong focus on domestic explanations for national citizenship models can be regarded as a manifestation of methodological nationalism in the social sciences, but it is also due to a lack of available data that would allow systematically comparing particular regulations of the acquisition and loss of citizenship across large numbers of states.

GLOBALCIT, the successor of EUDO Citizenship since 2017, addresses the need to understand the varieties of citizenship laws and policies in a globalised world. It relies on a large international network of country experts who write country reports, collect legal documents and provide input for our comparative databases. GLOBALCIT publishes qualitative databases on modes of acquisition and loss of citizenship with nearly fully global coverage, as well as quantitative indicators on citizenship status and electoral rights. Our updated and expanded CITLAW datasets cover nearly all modes of citizenship acquisition and loss in 42 European countries for 2011 and 2016; our 2016 CITLAW birthright dataset provides comparative and user-friendly data on the acquisition of citizenship at birth.

Celebrating our continuous geographical and thematic expansion, discussing new findings and insights, and evolving research agendas, this workshop explores (a) patterns of variation and clustering among countries with regard to their citizenship regimes and (b) global trends in citizenship reform and diffusion processes of citizenship policies. It focuses on birthright, naturalisation and e-citizenship. Papers will offer explanatory hypotheses, interpretive accounts or normative evaluations about convergence, domestic policy reforms and progressive development of international legal norms in matters of nationality law.

Giorgia Giovannetti | European University Institute & University of Florence

Giovanni Andornino | University of Torino and Torino World Affairs Institute (T.wai)

Description

This Executive Training Seminar brings together European and Chinese scholars with experience in strategic foresight, to cover economic, social and policy analysis of China’s recent dynamics and future development plans, with a highly interactive methodology. Participants will be required to actively participate in the last part of the course, in order to translate what they have learnt into plausible scenarios.

Over the first two days of activities, participants will be exposed to a variety of perspectives on China’s latest cycle of domestic reforms, their impact on world trade, regional and global macro-economic stability, and international development. Beijing’s increasingly proactive economic, foreign and security policies will be examined in the context of the ’One Belt, One Road’ initiative and President Xi Jinping’s signature proposition to enhance Eurasian connectivity and foster growth, as well as in the context of the China 2025 programme.

The executive training then culminates in a half-day scenario-building exercise. Participants are led to identify and assess relevant macro-variables, isolating megatrends and critical uncertainties in order to articulate alternative ’futures’ and discuss appropriate policies to steer from the ‘official future’ to the preferred scenario. All speakers join in the exercise to maximise the learning impact and ensure that the different viewpoints are represented.

Speakers:

Giovanni Andornino – The Political Topography of the Chinese Party-State after the 19th CCP Congress

Andrea Goldstein – China’s FDIs in the EU: Trends, Strategies, and European Reactions

Men Honghua – The Security Implications of China’s more ambitious Foreign Policy Posture

** KEYNOTE SPEECH: Enrico Letta (TBC) **

Logistics

Training courses offered by the Academy of Global Governance are generally free of charge. Admission, though, is granted only on the basis of a successful application (APPLY HERE). Confirmed participants are expected to bear the costs of their travel and accommodation themselves.

Scholarships

There is a limited number of scholarships available, designed as contribution to the coverage of a participant’s travel and accommodation costs. These scholarships are strictly reserved to people from the least developed countriesas defined by the United Nations. Application deadline for scholarships: 30 October 2017.

Giorgia Giovannetti | European University Institute and University of Florence

Giovanni Andornino | University of Torino and Torino World Affairs Institute (T.wai)

Description

This Executive Training Seminar brings together scholars and policy analysts from key Russian, European, and American institutions for an intensive program combining insights into Russia’s current socio-political dynamics, foreign policy, and international political economy.

Over the first two days of activities, participants will be exposed to multiple perspectives on the state of the Russian economy and industrial sector, Russia’s relations with major powers and its regional role in Central Asia and the Middle East, the political economy of sanctions, and the evolution of the official rhetoric of Russia as a civilizational state with a distinct system of cultural values.

The Executive Training Seminar then culminates in a half-day-long scenario-making exercise. Participants are led to identify and assess relevant macro-variables – chiefly of political and economic nature –, isolating megatrends and critical uncertainties in order to articulate alternative “futures” and discuss appropriate policies to steer from the “official future” to the preferred scenario.

Speakers

Giovanni Andornino, University of Torino and Torino World Affairs Institute

Giorgia Giovannetti, European University Institute and University of Florence

Serena Giusti, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa

Andrey Kortunov, Russian International Affairs Council

Alexander Gabuev, Carnegie Moscow Centre

Logistics

Training courses offered by the Academy of Global Governance are generally free of charge. Admission, though, is granted only on the basis of a successful application (APPLY HERE). Confirmed participants are expected to bear the costs of their travel and accommodation themselves.

Scholarships

There is a limited number of scholarships available, designed as contribution to the coverage of a participant’s travel and accommodation costs. These scholarships are strictly reserved to people from the least developed countriesas defined by the United Nations. Application deadline for scholarships: 30 October 2017.